My entire dating adult life, I have been laboring under the apparent misconception that the best day of the week to go on a date with a stranger you met on your phone is Tuesday. Or Wednesday. I am saddened to learn that I have been wrong, this whole time.
To Larson, a weekday date is a nightmare because your nerves are jangled from the workday. Sliding into a bar stool next to a person after a day of work means that your conversation will be about work. Besides, she argues, by Sunday, you’re fresh as a daisy, a sparkling conversationalist, primed and ready to chat with élan and wit about anything other than that bitch in sales who makes you want to die.
I believe that our social skills peak on Sunday nights, only to return to a monosyllabic nadir on Monday morning. For me, social skills are sort of a “use it or lose it” deal. Which is to say, if I go a few hours without talking to a person, I forget how to do it. After a weekend of safe chats with people I know well, by Sunday evening I’ve refined all my new funny jokes, and I’m properly lubed up for chit-chat with a stranger.
A Sunday date, she writes, offsets the “Sunday Scaries”—that overwhelming feeling of generalized doom and anxiety about the impending workweek—allowing you to wallow not in your own stew of misery and discomfort, but to meet another human with whom you’d maybe mash genitals with, if the mood strikes.
To her credit, she acknowledges the two potential downsides of a Sunday date: if the date sucks, your week is sort of ruined, before it even really had a chance to start; also, Sunday night is a bold night to initiate sexy time with a stranger, especially if you both have to work in the morning. I don’t disagree with the positives or the negatives she presents, but I do see one gaping hole in her logic: at the risk of sounding like a yogurt commerical, Sundays are a really good day for Me Time.
Do all your socializing and your brunching and your day drinking on Saturday. Get it all out of the way. Sundays are a great day to go to the grocery store, make something experimental in the slow cooker and watch four hours of whatever streaming garbage you’re enjoying on the TV. Sundays are good for folding laundry and buying a plant you’re going to kill three months down the line. They’re a day for you—not a day for a stranger who will buy you one to three beers and make you feel either very good or very bad.
My belief in Sundays as the day for Megan only is so strong that, after reading Larson’s piece, I ferried this hot link over to the work chat, plopped it in, and waited patiently for my colleagues to confirm my gut instinct that no, Sunday is actually the worst day for a date, and why on earth would anyone suggest it, surely they’re insane?
To my absolute shock, Kate Dries, Joanna Rothkopf, and Kelly Stout chimed in: Joanna’s first date with her boyfriend was on a Sunday, and he “made her guacamole on a picnic table.” Kate’s first date with her boyfriend was also on a Sunday; Kelly went on a date with a man she would eventually marry on a Sunday, too. Three success stories, when I was expecting the exact opposite? My world has been effectively rocked and I am forced to reconsider everything I thought I knew
Maybe GQ is right. Technically, they are. Sunday really is the best day to go on a date.
